A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.4

Here's where things get interesting, where we start to try to apply The Power of Pull's "new approach to value creation" to the actual, real-world workings of UCP. 

"When we serve people with disabilities and their families, the economics of it are very difficult. We know that here in the United States we've been experiencing an economic downturn. It creates very difficult challenges for us and our service wing, and for the programs that we provide." 

Stephen Bennett, UCP CEO & President*

*  *  *  *  *

This (below) -- on the whole and in a nutshell -- is John Seely Brown & Co.'s advice for organizations facing "difficult challenges". I'll explain how it's derived in a sec.

In order to thrive in a post-Big Shift world, individuals and institutions should consider how they move from innovating at a product and service level (i.e., flooding the market with new, marginally improved products) to innovating at an institutional level.

Okay:

In "A Tale...9.3.2B" I pointed out how UCP repeatedly touts its own history / longevity as a selling point. When it dawned on me that it does that, I went back to The Power of Pull and unearthed this sentence: “What we knew yesterday -- either as employees or in terms of what our institution as a whole knows about its business -- is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today." 

"Our history" is proving to be less and less helpful today.

How much less helpful? 

So much that the need to make significant changes has become imperative for most organizations. And the real bummer? Cutting costs and developing new, marginally differentiated products and services in attempts to raise revenues probably isn't going far enough. 

We can collectively kiss business as usual goodbye.

Q1: What is going far enough? What will work? More specifically, where are the rich new sources of growth to be found?

A1: On the periphery of the organization. Resist messing with your core operations, the authors say. Seek out "edge players" instead.

Q2: Why edge players?

A2: Because they're more likely to introduce you to new insights and help you more rapidly develop -- ready for this? -- new knowledge stocks.

Q3: Aren't knowledge stocks old hat? 

A3: No, it's hoarding and fixating on them that's to be guarded against. An organization actually makes hay from its knowledge stocks. (People value the One-Stop Resource Guide, for example, and that leads them, in turn, to donate to UCP.) It’s a balancing act. "As clockspeed increases, refreshing the stocks of what we know by participating in flows of new knowledge is fundamental to performance improvement. Stocks are both a means and an end to participation in knowledge flows."

So:

Participating in flows of new knowledge on the edge is the way to go. 

Is it the way UCP should go?

Hmmm...

One thing I don't know is to what extent UCP may need to enact major change, i.e., how badly it needs to transform its mindset in order to survive and prosper in tomorrow's world. (Here I'm trying to juggle thoughts about both UCP-National and its larger affiliate network simultaneously. No doubt a ridiculous thing to try to do.) It depends on its competitive situation**. If things are still "difficult," due either to Big Shift forces of globalization and rapid advancements in digital technology OR to a down economy, then major change may be needed and JSB's answers / approach may be advisable.

That's one way of looking at things. 

Say, on the other hand, though, that the situation has eased -- that things are returning more or less to normal and it's no longer as hard as it was 2-3 years ago for UCP to serve its customers. (i.e., that it's not imperative to make major changes) If that's the case, might the authors' notion of innovating at the institutional level still be worth exploring simply because it's a better way of doing things, a better way of creating value?

'S'far as I'm concerned --
Until and unless cerebral palsy and UCP are done away with, we need to continue to look for better ways of doing things. 
Alluding to the very beginnings of this series and rephrasing this post's biggest question: 

Could innovating at the institutional level make UCP a better, more effective hope machine?

I think there's a distinct possibility that it could. So, in subsequent posts I'll keep probing:

• Why might growth opportunities for UCP be brighter on the edge(s)? What about in those areas where, unlike for-profit firms, UCP faces very little or no competition: is it better off trying to innovate around its core operations and processes? 

• If choosing to participate in flows of new knowledge on the edge seems prudent, then -- what's the prescription for doing it right? What would innovating at the institutional level look like at UCP?

In addressing those, I'll want to scrutinize some of UCP's more recent innovations: how to categorize them, how to think of them in light of the authors' advice, etc. Here I'm thinking of the World CP Challenge. I'm thinking of Mission Driven Business. I'm thinking of Life Labs. (all on the national level) And -- while I don't think it qualifies as an innovation -- the Emerging Leaders Academy is related and comes to mind, as well. I also hope to be able to address it vis-a-vis JSB.

*source: UCP Annual Report '10-'11

**I hope to be able to give more thought to UCP's competition in section 11. Notes to self: Red Treehouse competes in some ways with UCP. And, three categories of affiliate-competitors that come to mind are (1.) independent therapy clinics (2.) intermediate care facilities, and (3.) hospital comprehensive CP programs.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.3.3

KNOWLEDGE FLOWS: Interactions that (1.) create knowledge or transfer it across individuals; (2.) occur in social, fluid environments that allow firms and individuals to get better faster by working with others

So, if I read a white paper and its author's "brainstuffs" are thus mingled with mine -- am I participating in a flow of new knowledge? Does the fact that I can get back to him or her via e-mail make that a social and fluid environment?

I'm not in love with JSB & Co.'s definition because it doesn't really help me understand why knowledge flows are becoming so all-important. ( Organizations must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity.") And, don't most of us already participate in knowledge flows? Isn't that what people do? I'm sure everyone at UCP-National, for example, is learning on the job...

What's the big deal?

Before I try and answer, I want to take a stab at identifying how and where UCP may presently be participating in flows of new knowledge.

First, two particular "social, fluid environments" o' theirs beg my attention: 

• In its role as a news provider, PE&O is right where the action is -- processing information; moving it from the newsmakers to the rest of us -- on a daily basis. (Think SmartBrief.)

• Online communities like the one found at www.mychildwithoutlimits.org are HELPING MEMBERS HELP OTHER MEMBERS by enabling knowledge transfers that support, inspire, etc.

Surely UCP is participating in knowledge flows in these cases, no?

Well, on closer inspection...

No. I'd say that knowledge is flowing but that UCP isn't really participating -- at least in the sense of trying to better itself in the process. It's acting in both cases as a middleman, facilitating the transfer of knowledge. The actual contents (of the news and online-community-exchanges) may just as well be widgets. 

Where else could we look for evidence of UCP's participation in knowledge flows? Maybe this is a cop-out, but, the fact of the matter is that it's hard to get a glimpse of them from the outside. Knowledge flows are by definition dynamic and fluid. They're happening at the edge; they've yet to be made explicit. That said --

How about Twitter, Facebook, or the like as places to look?

COME TO THINK OF IT THERE WAS A LIFE LABS BLOG POST having to do with its practice of browsing for events to attend outside of the assistive technology arena. (in search of "different perspectives on solutions for people with disabilities") This may have been a clue that Life Labs is routinely participating in knowledge flows. 

And for actual evidence that it is?

Life Labs recently announced that it's formed a partnership with the AbleGamers Foundation to co-create mobile accessible gaming stations. (link to announcement) This may someday prove to be an example of how it pays to participate in knowledge flows. From its site: "Life Labs already has a major UCP affiliate interested in several of these mobile gaming stations and is excited to be able to offer the station to the general public once a prototype is completed."

*  *  *  *  *

There's still lots of fuzziness surrounding these notions of stocks and flows. I think it might be helpful, next, to reopen JSB's PLAYBOOK for PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT IN A POST BIG-SHIFT WORLD  (a.k.a. THE POWER OF PULL) and see exactly how they figure in.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.4.B

My understanding is that the My Child Without Limits forum is actually managed by Inspire, an outfit that builds online health and wellness communities and offers them free to advocacy organizations like UCP. It’s responsible for moderation, technical support, back-end communications, and other day-to-day obligations.

‘Z’at mean that UCP doesn’t know its collaborative stuff?

Nope. It means that UCP chose to outsource in this case. The only thing that counts, anyhow, is the value people do or don't derive. The forum at My Child seems active. Participants seem to like it...

What I can't tell by browsing is if and how UCP benefits. Or if its managers have the know-how and know-what to pull off something like it on their own. And, can they use social media to collaborate communally for other purposes? The foundation for becoming a social organization is in place. But what about the other stuff that sits on top?

To attempt an answer, we still have two wholly home-grown community collaboration efforts we can look at: Life Labs and (one I left out of the discussion in part A) Brave Kids.

*  *  *  *  *

Like My Child, Brave Kids is an issue-specific campaign with its own site: www.bravekids.org. Brave Kids' mission is to serve “children and youth with disabilities and chronic /life-threatening illnesses by providing a support community, information and resources on numerous medical conditions like genetic diseases, autism, cancer, cerebral palsy, ADD, etc.” 

One of the primary goals at Brave Kids is to help kids build connections with other kids based on their similar experiences. Looking to its online community for signs, however -- that hoped-for connection building isn't happening. Participation is anemic. (the flip-side o' what you see at My Child) To date there have been “3 Posts in 2 Topics by 2 Members,” the most recent coming over six months ago.

I could make more or less the same observation with regard to the participation levels at Life Labs. (re: its Google Group and wiki, for examples)

SOCIAL MEDIA, PURPOSE, and COMMUNITY are the three indispensables of community collaboration. I don't see participants in these cases being mobilized to contribute. I don't see collaboration being generated on a meaningful scale, i.e., there's no tapping into the full knowledge, talent, innovation, and energy of large groups of people. The COMMUNITY component is MIA.

One might argue that both sites, both communities, are still relatively young -- to which Gartner would counter: “Social media environments do not grow slowly over time.” 

The harsh reality is that most social media initiatives either fail to attract interest or deliver real value to the organization. Participation doesn’t usually just happen. Keep in mind a key Gartner insight: Community collaboration isn’t primarily a technology implementation. It’s a management challenge. “Let us be clear: if IT alone leads the effort," the authors of The Social Organization say, "you have already stepped off the path to success. Business leadership is crucial." 

Life Labs’ Director is UCP’s IT Director…

*  *  *  *  *

If it is the case that both would-be communities are struggling, what would Gartner do? How would it go about trying to help? Methodically -- it'd start with a complete medical history, so to speak. Performed on macroscopic and microscopic levels:

MACROSCOPIC 

At the level of the WHOLE ORGANIZATION, Gartner would want to look at all the visioning and strategizing activities that lead to okaying the two projects in the first place. It would help UCP assess whether or not community collaboration was an appropriate choice, and help establish (on closer inspection) that both projects were worth pursuing. This'd entail: 

• Making sure the purposes were well formed, and that they clearly articulated the benefits to community members and the value to the organization;

• Doing "grow" assessments to systematically determine if and how the community collaboration efforts should have moved forward;

• Looking at the projects as parts of a coherent portfolio of purposeful communities -- and making decisions about them accordingly.

MICROSCOPIC

At the INDIVIDUAL COMMUNITY level, Gartner would want to focus on all the following steps required to cultivate -- prepare and launch -- a successful community: 

Prepare. A green light (indicating "Yes, we think we're going to want to invest in Life Labs and /or Brave Kids") at the macroscopic level still requires more focused and vigorous efforts to decide if and how to proceed. For each proposed purpose and community, those efforts should have resulted in:

• a purpose roadmap; a malleable plan for its evolution (how the community can evolve to deliver sustained value over time);

• a more formal business justification, one that describes the concrete sources of expected value.

"This combination provides solid footing to progress to the launch phase, where a desired community becomes a reality.”

Launch. A successful launch entails: 

• Exploring and defining the participant experience;

• Creating the right environment (addressing structure, ease of use, choosing the right social media technologies, and more);

• Engaging the community, i.e., grabbing and holding participants’ attention (setting critical mass targets and rapidly driving participation).

*  *  *  *  *

Gartner's overriding objective would be to help UCP build the capabilities to achieve meaningful, repeatable, and significant organizational value with social media technologies -- 

To help UCP hoist itself, in other words, securely onto the FORGING rung.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.4.A

An organization that makes it to the FORGING rung (step five of six on Gartner’s analogical ladder) is in rarefied air. UCP shows signs of being close. As I hinted at earlier, though, I doubt that it’s actually there – in no small part because the deck's been stacked against it from the start. 

What do I mean?

Becoming a social organization isn’t easy. The authors of The Social Organization warn us of that in the Intro, and then re-warn readers in Chapter 3 that putting mass collaboration to work requires “a high degree of corporate skill that most companies will struggle to develop for many years to come.” It only stands to reason that UCP is probably struggling, too. 

Those same authors also researched community collaboration adoption across many fields. When it came time to rank the more active adopters, nonprofits didn’t make the cut. “The highest adoption tier comprises retail, government, media, IT, and consumer products.” Except maybe for the elite of the elite, I wouldn’t expect health nonprofits to be up to the same speed (as organizations in those other industries).*

Still...

In significant ways UCP looks to be bucking any low-to-moderate expectations and becoming a social organization:

• It has a history of having experimented with online communities over the years. (to which I’ve alluded before) 

• UCP has professed its belief in the strategic importance of community collaboration. From its most recent annual report: “UCP recognizes the power of social media to amplify the voices of people with disabilities and all who care about their civil rights struggle. UCP invests heavily in updating and refocusing its social media presence during fiscal years 2010 and 2011.” This tells me the requisite mindset is in place, i.e., the people pulling the strings there don’t think entirely in terms of hierarchy and traditional management. 

• As a parent of a child with CP, I’m thankful that there are multiple ways for me to communicate and collaborate – not only with UCP’s staff, but with its whole network of friends, beneficiaries, partners, and so on. UCP has advanced past the “broadcasting at people” to the “engaging with people” stage. 

To the last point, you could say UCP now manages its own portfolio of platforms. (something social organizations do) Some of them are limited-time-only. Others are ongoing. Next thing I want to do is arrange the ones I know about accordingly.

A ONE-SHOT DEAL?

In conjunction with World CP Day, UCP is one of several global sponsors of the Change my world in 1 minute initiative. How it works: “Throughout August and September [2012], people with cerebral palsy were given the opportunity to express what they needed to make their lives more independent or rewarding. Those ideas were posted…and participants were asked to vote for the ideas they liked the best.” Now in its second phase, this is a great example of a collaborative community charged with performing a variety of disparate tasks, including generating innovative ideas and locating experts (crowd sourcing) in a large community.  

CONTINUOUS

• “Why build your own social community if you can achieve your purpose on someone else’s?” UCP has joined some existing general social web communities (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and maintains multiple accounts.** 

• The My Child Without Limits Support Community connects families, friends and caregivers for support and inspiration. It’s a powerful platform that enables people to connect and collaborate with others in a variety of ways, most notably via a discussion forum. Rather than build this community from scratch, UCP opted to join an existing specific social web community. More about this in part B.

• Life Labs is a home-grown UCP social community. (It’s “only” five clicks away from UCP's homepage if you know what you’re looking for! That’ll be my only jab. I personally think all of these communities are a little hard to get to.) One of the key objectives of the Life Without Limits initiative as it’s currently construed is to help improve the lives “of people with disabilities by harnessing the latest innovations in technology to increase their access to the wider world and marketplace.” Life Labs is dedicated to developing technology-based solutions for people with disabilities and partnering with others who are similarly interested in accessible and inclusive technology. Among other things, its site employs social technologies out the wazoo. There’s: a blog; an option to join Life Labs on Google Groups; a Twitter account; a wiki…

My Child and Life Labs are collaborative communities. It's through these, in particular, that UCP demonstrates that the foundation is there, the basics are in place, for becoming a social organization. 

The platforms show me that UCP knows [1.] what collaborative communities are, [2.] what the defining characteristics are, and [3.] how organizations are using mass collaboration to achieve bigger, faster and better results: 

1. Remember the three indispensable components for mass collaboration?  Life Labs has what I think is a compelling PURPOSE. There’s a very active COMMUNITY at My Child. Both sites use SOCIAL MEDIA extensively. UCP obviously does.
2. Both communities are run in accordance with Gartner's “fundamental principles or defining characteristics of mass collaboration.” Without going into detail, the six (6) principles are : participation, collective, transparency, independence, persistence, and emergence.
3. In both instances UCP's using social media in support of “collective intelligence”: the pooling of small and incremental contributions into a coherent and useful body of knowledge. (Via Life Labs, for example, people are generating innovative ideas, solving difficult challenges, and engineering products. At My Child, people are posting content, augmenting it, categorizing it, and so on.) This is a proven -- legit', if you will -- way of using mass collaboration advantageously. 

To repeat: the foundation is there. 

Now...

How far can UCP go? How are the communities built on that foundation actually doing? How much real value are they delivering? And, how well is UCP doing all the other things it needs to do to build collaboration competence up and down the organization? Well enough to garner a great Gartner grade?

My best guess in part B.

*especially in the absence of fierce and direct competition
**It has at least three different Facebook accounts, for example.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.2

When you use social media for community collaboration as a matter of course, when it’s the way you operate, when challenges or opportunities arise and "Would a community be a better way to deal with this?" always gets asked – yours has become a social organization. Per Gartner, you’ve reached the FUSING stage, the topmost rung on its SIX F attitude-toward-social-media ladder. THE place to aspire to be. 

An organization on the bottommost rung, on the other hand, views social media as a source of entertainment with insufficient or no business value. It has a FOLLY attitude. Which is NO place to be. (Or truer to the Gartner spirit, no place to stay if you hope to become great at what you do.)

On which rung or rungs do Red Treehouse and UCP stand? Where are they in terms of their development? How sophisticated are they in their understanding of social media?

These are the kinds of things I’ve been trying to zero in on with the help of my borrowed Gartnerscope: a precision instrument, to be sure -- though its usefulness and my views through it have been limited by the fact that I'm on the outside looking in. Unfortunate. But you have to start somewhere. 

RED TREEHOUSE:

So, based on what I’ve seen and not on what may be comin’ down the pike...

I’d peg the social media attitude at Red Treehouse near the lower end of Gartner’s ladder, somewhere in the FOLLY—FEARFUL—FLIPPANT range. The organization as a whole appears either to have a limited interest in, or a limited understanding of, social media and the management tools needed to realize its potential. 

Flipped around and restated: Red Treehouse seems to have lots of room for growth in this regard. Lots of room for adding new organizational competencies. 

A couple of things that've informed my view: 

• Red Treehouse is a relative non-user of social media. It did join a social Web community known as Facebook (heard of it?) in October of last year – but that's the last time anyone from the organization shared anything there. My recommendation would be to disable the account in the interest of "doing no harm" to RT's reputation, if only for the time being.

• This may come as a surprise given the organization’s mission to be a vibrant gathering place, but I don’t see www.redtreehouse.org as an online community in the Gartner sense. 

 I aim to elaborate in the next post. 

UCP:

The ideal of Internet-connected and hyper-empowered people has been near ‘n’ dear to the Life Without Limits initiative from the start. UCP saw the potential of social media enabled communities back then and it's been exploring ever since. (Sometimes very imaginatively. Before we address UCP circa today, let me point out that Ruby’s Bequest [2009] was a crowd-sourced immersive scenario game that’s well worth looking into if you’re not already familiar with it.)

Fast forward to the present. 

I’m puzzled why there are no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube badges or links on the homepage at www.ucp.org (or throughout the site, for that matter). Nevertheless, I can look beyond that. And when I do --

It becomes clear, first of all, that UCP has one foot squarely on Gartner’s fourth rung. It easily meets the criteria for having a FORMULATING attitude toward social media in that it: treats social media as more than technologies, funds multiple social media platforms, and integrates community collaboration in a variety of ways. 

What’s harder to tell from the outside is whether or not UCP's other foot is firmly on the fifth, a.k.a. FORGING rung. By definition, organizations at this stage have “developed the capabilities needed for consistent, repeatable success with social media across the enterprise.” Has UCP been building the right kinds of managerial capabilities behind the scenes? I'm not sure.

On one hand, I have some doubts. I’ll express why in an upcoming post. (For now, even the fact that telltale social media signs at www.ucp.org are so few and far between makes me wonder.) More detective work is needed. 

On the other hand, there's a UCP community -- I have in mind the forum at www.mychildwithoutlimits.org -- that seems to be making all the right moves. There's also LIFE LABS: an online R&D center for creating technology-based solutions to problems facing people with disabilities. It looks to be a collaborative community in the truest sense. It features social networks and other Web 2.0 projects (including, for example a wiki for submitting assistive technology ideas and potential projects, i.e., things “to build upon and improve”)...

I’ll elaborate on all of the above and go more specifically into what Gartner may have to offer Red Treehouse and UCP, individually and separately, in the next few posts.